


Waiting for a Roar

by WeekendWriter



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Anchorage Shatterdome, Becket brotherly feels, Groundhog Day, M/M, Nobody Stays Dead I Promise, Raleigh/Chuck if you squint really hard, Yancy Becket Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 10:12:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10851843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeekendWriter/pseuds/WeekendWriter
Summary: Raleigh is holding off Knifehead’s advances with his knee as the pain courses through his shoulder. The whirring noise of the plasma canon does nothing to drown out his own screaming, his brother’s screaming, or Gipsy’s metal body screaming as she’s ravaged by that unforgiving mouth.There’s a flash as the plasma canon finally tears into Knifehead’s middle.There’s nothing.There’s Raleigh’s screams tearing into the walls of their shared bunk in the Icebox.





	Waiting for a Roar

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on this idea for a while so I figured I'd finally post it since I've been in the Becket feels today. Hope you guys enjoy! Please feel free to leave kudos, comments, etc.

“Hey! Kiddo, stop!”

Rough hands shake his arms and an insistent voice barks into his ear. The hands were human and warm and felt like home, but the leftover confusion is still enough that Raleigh jerks sideways and hits the floor hard. He glances wildly to the right. The screen on the opposite end of the room is dark. No kaiju alarm to interrupt their morning, and as Raleigh stands he notices that clock’s face reads 0800. 

Not 0200. 

_What time is it?_

_Two_.

_AM?_

Raleigh jumps to his feet and grabs his brother’s shoulders. If he thought Yancy looked shook while trying to wake him, the older Becket looks beyond concerned now. Those dark blue eyes stare unflinchingly back into his own and Raleigh breathe a sigh of relief.

“ _Yancy_.” It was little more than a breath.

“Yeah, kid. Who else would it be?” 

Of course Yancy tries for humor to lighten the mood. Raleigh huffs a weak laugh and somehow manages to tighten his grip on Yancy’s shoulders. “No one, of course. I just… had a fuck of a dream, I guess.”

“I know.” Yancy frowns and grasps his hands. “Felt a bit of the end of it through the ghost drift. You sure you’re okay, Raleigh?”

The older Becket only uses full names when he’s really concerned, so Raleigh forces himself to shake his head and say with more conviction, “’m good, Yance. What’s for breakfast?”

Yancy chuckles. “You and your damn stomach, kid. Lemme throw some pants on and we can get breakfast.”

Raleigh changes his own shirt since it’s basically drenched in his panicked sweat from his less-than-restful-night and tries to shake the dread he still feels. The kaiju, the circuitry burns, Yancy’s screams – it all felt far too real to be a dream. But what else could it have been?

“Rals, listen–”

_Raleigh, listen to me!_

The phrase tears through his mind without warning – tears so quickly that he jolts his head sideways into the bedframe. “Ow, fuck!” Raleigh has a feeling that the smooth move wasn’t the sole cause of the sudden splitting headache.

Yancy’s head peeks out from the bathroom door. “Okay, kid, now you’re really starting to worry me. We’re stopping by medical on the way to breakfast. Capisce?” 

As per his older-brotherly duty, Yancy wasn’t going to let this go. And as Raleigh rubs his aching head, he figures the elder Becket probably had a point. “Fine, old man.”

A snort sounds from the sink. “Not so sure I’m the old one if you can’t even get out of bed like a normal person anymore.”

“Fuck off.”

To no one’s surprise, medical gives him a clean bill of health. The techs coddle him a little upon seeing the spooked expression behind his eyes, but there is nothing that can be done to fix that medicine-wise. So, Raleigh sucks it up long enough to make it to what was now lunch with Yancy and the other techs. The day passes in a slow, if weird, blur that leaves him grateful when he finally gets to lay his head on the pillow. 

“Night, kiddo.”

“G’night, Yance.”

He’s drifting comfortably under the line of consciousness when the kaiju alarm startles him awake. Startles him so badly, in fact, that he flounders over the side of his bunk onto the floor. Yet again. It’s becoming downright impressive at this point. “Ah, fuck!”

A string of consonants sound from the other side of the room – Yancy’s ‘it’s too fucking early’ version of asking him if he’s okay. Raleigh grunts back in response as the monitor behind him speaks.

– _Category Three kaiju: Codename Knifehead_ –

Raleigh’s blood pounds in his ears as he feels his heard jackknife into his throat. _Knifehead_. 

The sound of the plasma canon echoes distantly in his head.

“Yancy–” The rest of the sentence dies in his throat, which has become so dry that Raleigh can’t even breathe for a few seconds. That, or it’s the crushing fear feeding back from his dream that has a chokehold on his oxygen.

“I know kiddo, I’m up.” Yancy slides from his bunk, rubbs his face, and turns, only to run straight into Raleigh’s bulk. 

“Yancy, we can’t.” Raleigh doesn’t know what else to say. There’s no way he can explain any of what he can feel without sounding like a lunatic, even to his own brother.

He isn’t sure if it’s his tone or the panic his brother must be able to feel through the ghost drift, but Yancy glances at him as though he’s not speaking English. “We… gotta? It’s time to suit up.”

Raleigh just gapes. He can’t not suit-up, Yancy’s right, but the Deja-vu has him itching to run in the opposite direction. He forces himself through the motions and follows Yancy to the drivesuit room.

 

 

_I’m in your head, kid. I know what you’re thinking_.

_Raleigh listen to me! You need to–_

The blinding white-blue light of the plasma–

 

 

The thin fabric of his sweats practically stick to the sheets when Raleigh sits bolt upright in his bunk.

_Raleigh, listen to me!_

He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms until they burn. Once is a coincidence, but twice… 

What kind of hell is this?

It couldn’t _really_ be hell – Gipsy’s shielding would be enough to protect him from the resulting blowback of the plasma caster, which means he’s not dead – so what the fuck is happening to him?

“You okay, kid?” Yancy is, once again, up before him and shoots him a concerned glance in the sink mirror. 

This time, Raleigh doesn’t even have anything to say to the older blonde. He grips the roots of his hair and sinks slowly back into the bed. Except retreating isn’t an option, not when he can still taste blood in his mouth from Yancy’s helmet shattering against the edge of Gipsy’s torn head. So he slides down the side of his bunk and instead examines the older Becket as he goes about getting ready.

Yancy’s feet shuffle against the floor, because even after years of early wake-up calls at the academy, 0800 is still too early for him to be up and functioning. His hair is rucked up in all directions instead of its usual combed condition, and is different still from the matted helmet-hair that hangs ever-so-slightly over his eyes as he glances at Raleigh through the drivesuit helmet. The corners of that smart mouth are relaxed around a toothbrush instead of spread in a scream to force out helpful last words for his little brother.

Raleigh clutches his chest and leans heavily on his bunk. 

Blue eyes suddenly appear in his personal space. “You okay, Rals?”

He wheezes in response. Words still aren’t forming and soon he can’t breathe. Yancy ends up rushing him into medical so that the techs can calm him down from the panic attack. Raleigh spends the day confined to a bed in a tiny room and the techs bar anyone, even Yancy, from visiting since they can’t rule out stimulation from others as the cause of the attack. He has to be ready to fight any time (since apparently no one but him seems to be aware of the exact date and time of the impending attack) so they’re only concern is bringing his vitals back down and keeping him calm so that he can be ready to save the world. 

The kaiju alarm pulls him out of slumber in medical. This morning, he doesn’t even get to glance at Yancy until they’re both in the drivesuit room suiting up for the conn-pod. He wants to reach out to tell Yancy what’s happening, to try to warn him, anything – but the drivesuit techs block his line of sight.   
And he isn’t sure they wouldn’t throw him back in medical for a psych eval after he says what he’s thinking. 

This time, as Pentecost’s voice fades from the conn-pod, Raleigh removes his hand from the mic and remains silent for a second. Then: “Let’s just stay here.”

Yancy glances at him from his right, surprised. “Not itchin’ to go fishin’, kid?”

Despite the weird memories of the past few leap days that haven’t been, Raleigh still feels the slight tug to disobey Pentecost’s orders. He wonders if the urge will always be there to deviate from the norm.

“I think maybe it’s best to wait this one out,” Raleigh decides.

His brother grunts in response, articulate as always. “Nothing for those ten guys, then?”

The guilt burns steadily in Raleigh’s gut. Save those ten guys, or save Yancy? The choice shouldn’t be difficult, but it is. He supposes they wouldn’t be heroes if Raleigh didn’t at least consider giving up his brother, and possibly himself, for the lives of ten others. But he’s tired, tired of waking in a cold sweat with a hole in his soul that’s not quite there yet (but will be, his nerves reassure him). 

And clearly, doing the same thing isn’t the answer here.

“They’ll live.”

 

They don’t. 

Knifehead upends the boat on the way to the Anchorage shoreline. The kaiju manages to launch a piece of the boat into Gipsy’s conn-pod – on Yancy’s side, of course. This time, Raleigh faces the beast with his brother’s lifeless body strapped in beside him.

 

 

The scream that tears itself from his throat as he wakes is enough to send the people living on either side of them knocking on the bunk door as Yancy shakes him awake. 

 

 

– _Category Three Kaju: Codename Knifehead_ –

Raleigh barricades himself in their shared bathroom. The misery and depth of his loss is enough for Yancy to head to LOCCENT and declare that they’re not fit to pilot today.

Romeo Blue doesn't make it until the kaiju until it hits the city – and five cities after that. Thousands are probably dead by the end of Knifehead’s rampage, though Raleigh never gets an actual count of lives lost. 

Because he’s too busy heaving his stomach into the toilet until he passes out, the sound of the plasma canon that didn’t shoot this time still echoing in his mind.

 

 

This time, Raleigh wake slowly. Without the screaming, he has time to wake before Yancy gets out of bed. The past few leap days catch up to him in a rush. He folds himself over the edge of the bed and pads slowly over to Yancy’s side. 

Yancy isn’t quite snoring anymore, but the older blonde is clearly struggling to wake. Raleigh takes advantage of this and hauls himself up the bunk. There’s little space, what with the mattress being one of the shitty PPDC issue twin beds, but Raleigh expertly folds himself into the space between his brother’s shoulder blades. Yancy snorts a bit in confusion before he turns around and shifts himself closer. 

“’t time is it?” the older Becket huffs.

It was more syllables than Raleigh’s to this early. That’s a good change from the normal, Raleigh figures. There’s still at least sixteen hours until Knifehead will be tearing his life and his soul apart again, so why not enjoy this now?

“Time doesn’t exist today. We’ve got nothing to do,” Raleigh reassures as he cards a hand through Yancy’s hair.

“’nkay.” The ‘word’ is huffed sleepily against his neck before Yancy’s out cold again. 

Days – or was it a week already? – of Knifehead tearing the only good thing he had out of his life has left him with more of an appreciation of the time he haves with Yancy. They’ve always been under the impression that life could end at any moment given their line of work; that each deployment could easily be their last, especially with the bigger and badder kaiju crawling from the breach, but Raleigh never thought he’d have to face the reality of losing Yancy. 

Raleigh idly wonders if the events would ever progress past him losing Yancy and killing Knifehead because he can’t imagine what he’d do without Yancy. Couldn’t imagine what he’d do without the smartass remarks around every corner, without a partner-in-crime that knew his own thoughts better than he did, without an ounce of family in this world. That thought has him wrapping his limbs even tighter around the older man. 

Could he keep going after losing everything? He knows he won’t be able to drift again, won’t be able to let another person into his soul, won’t be able to pilot again unless his other half is glancing at him from the opposite side of the conn-pod. He and Yancy have been drifting for so long now that they practically are the same person; doing the same thing with someone else just seems… wrong. 

Could he exist and live outside the PPDC life without Yancy? He supposes. Would he want to?

Probably not. Why would he want to live in a world without his partner-in-crime?

He won’t. Raleigh decides right there and then that if push comes to shove, if he moves past that white-hot flash of plasma and leaves both his brother and the Category III behind, he won’t keep going.

 

 

_I’m in your head, kid_.

_Then let’s go fishing_.

The battle takes even less time with Raleigh’s newfound reckless attitude. He’s ready to die, ready to give in after the toll this horror show has taken on him, but all it does is cost his brother his life.

And this time, it’s not a quick and easy death.

Yancy gets snagged on one of Knifehead’s claws through the conn-pod and bleeds out instead.

It takes a full four minutes until he’s unresponsive.

 

 

“Why the hell am I so impulsive?”

“Huh?” Yancy glances over his vodka-tonic at him in surprise. 

This time, Raleigh convinces him that day-drinking before the alarm goes off is alright because he knows now with absolute certainty exactly when said alarm is going to go off. His second whiskey-ginger-ale has apparently made him ballsy enough to talk about the weird phenomenon even if there’s a distant part of his brain that screams at him to stop.

“Why can’t I just sit down and shut up and do what I’m told?” Raleigh blurts. Fuck stopping, apparently.

Yancy laughs, all easy grin and relaxed as he drapes himself over the bar chair. His movements are much more fluid than his muscle-cramped stance in Gypsy’s failing conn-pod, Raleigh notices dully. “Kid, if I’d figured that one out, my life would have been much easier up to this point.”

“You ever wish I wasn’t around?”

The question comes out sadder than he wants; Yancy snaps his head to look at him with that signature big-brother look. “Fuck no. What’s this about, Raleigh?”

Full names again. Shit, he’s in trouble. Raleigh drains the last of his glass and glares at the bar counter. “Would you just go along with a dumbass idea of mine if you knew it was going to get you killed?”

True to their honesty thing, Yancy takes his time to think about the question and sips on his drink. Raleigh has enough time to order another of his own before Yancy finally says, “I wouldn’t know that at the time. But yeah, I would.”

The answer makes Raleigh grip his glass tighter. “Why?”

Yancy shrugs. 

He knows there’s no reason for the older Becket to take this seriously, but the casual gesture pisses Raleigh off all the same. “You’d just fucking die and leave me here by myself, and have it be my fault with no other thought than ‘yeah, sure, why not’?”

Upon hearing his pissy tone, Yancy straightens in his chair. “Okay, maybe I’m not explaining it at a fifth-grade level well enough. I trust you. You’re my fucking brother; of course I trust you. Are you gonna make the best call every time? No. Am I going to make the best call that isn’t going to get you killed all the time? No. I can’t question every call you make. If I choose not to, it’s my own call in and of itself. So don’t you sit here and blame yourself for past calls you’ve made like some sort of fucking martyr, okay? We’re in it together. There’s no ‘my call’ or ‘your call’; as far as I’m concerned, we’ve made all the calls together.”

The words hit Raleigh like a freight train. All this time he’s been blaming himself for Yancy’s deaths as though they’re his fault because he’s the one that makes the call to go for the boat. But thinking about Yancy in the drift, of the two of them so intertwined that they’re both so wrapped up in each other’s thoughts that they’re not even separate thoughts anymore, makes him pause. 

What if this whole thing isn’t about him changing his mind or changing Yancy’s mind? All this time, he’s been acting as though Yancy hasn’t had a say in the events that transpire out in the frigid ocean. But maybe it doesn’t have to be his call. 

_I’m in your head, kid_.

_Then let’s go fishing_.

_Raleigh listen to me!_

Listen to _us_. That’s what he should have been listening for this whole time.

 

 

_Ready to step into my head, kid?_

Raleigh lets himself take the lead on this drift, because if there’s any chance of this working he needs them to be on the same page. So he steps in and lets the drift flow, throwing as much of the past few days – weeks – whatever – at Yancy as he can without forcing the other blonde to chase after it all. 

And as the neural handshake stabilizes, Yancy glances at him in awe. A thousand thoughts run through Raleigh’s mind, but the final one that filters through a bit slower is _help_.

Before he can speak, Raleigh liftes a hand to the mic and presses. “Sir, we’re holding the Miracle Mile. Requesting military support backup.”

“What the hell for?” The surprising break in Pentecost’s normally calm demeanor is such a departure from the other days that Raleigh feels a thrill run down his spine.

“Just…” Raleigh glances to his right and can’t help the _for him_ that escapes the private part of his mind. Yancy intercepts the thought and jerks back slightly at the force of it. “Trust us on this one. Please.”

 

 

When they finally reach those ten on the fishing boat, it’s on the background of the mighty Knifehead finally falling to the depths of the Atlantic. The Air Force support was enough to distract Knifehead from the boat, and the additional detection take away the sting Raleigh still remembers from Knifehead’s past surprise attack from the sea floor.

They made it. Yancy supports the fishing boat in his palm. Raleigh steals a glance at him and can’t help but grin at Yancy’s smirk. The unfamiliarity of the situation blows him away, but that’s something he could get used to. 

And when he wakes the next morning, it’s to Yancy’s frame wrapped calmly around his. He stretches, sweat free, and stares into a brand-new day.

 

 

“Everything alright Chuck?”

The ginger’s busy tossing frantic glances between the plan schematics on the table and Pentecost’s unyielding expression. His head jerks up at his father’s prompting. “Uh yeah… just…” Chuck pauses to swallow down his uncertainty and adds, “Just feel like I’ve been here before.”

Raleigh trades a guarded glance with Yancy. Had the situation not been so serious, they’d likely be laughing about it, but Raleigh still, all these years later, remembers that feeling all too well. He gathers the stunned Chuck up in an embrace, and okay, Yancy does crack up at Chuck’s offended expression. 

“Mate, the fuck–?”

With a squeeze, Raleigh relinquishes the touchy ginger. “Sorry Chuck. It’s just… you’re not going to believe the story I’ve got to tell you.”

Chuck observes the glance Raleigh and Yancy trade yet again, and his strong brow narrows. “Mate, we really don’t have the time–”

Raleigh barks out another laugh. “Trust me, kid, you’ve got all the time in the world.”


End file.
